It would be strange after all these years if I did not know New York far better than any other city in the world. But you must remember that I instinctively selected from this towering panorama certain quaint simple aspects which harmonized with my obstinately rustic and obstinately Gothic Nature. I used to go to Washington Square from Patchin Place, either by way of Tenth Street, where I made a fetish - or even a totem - of a poplar-tree that grew by the pavement's edge, or by way of Eleventh Street, where I always stopped to talk to Rachel Phillips, who about the time I was being born at Shirley was being buried in this little Portuguese-Hebrew burying-ground, and to whose gentle bones I acquired by degrees a faithful and almost romantic attachment.(Autobiography)

    There remain two cemeteries to visit, built by descendants of the first Portuguese Jews. One of these is the tiny triangle with twenty headstones familiar to Greenwich Villagers, on Eleventh Street, east of Sixth Avenue. The cemetery of those who died by plagues, particularly the dread yellow fever of 1798, it once covered many acres. The second, on Twenty-first Street, west of Sixth, has perhaps a hundred and fifty tombstones. Burials were made here as late as 1851, although it was against the law then, and several of the bereaved families had to pay a fine of two hundred and fifty dollars. The Portuguese Jews formed the Congregation Shearith Israel whose present congregation - their synagogue is at 99 Central Park West - has repeatedly rejected offers of hundreds of thousands for the Twenty-first Street site. Once a department store wanted to arch a building over the cemetery, leaving it undisturbed, but that plan was rejected, too. (Where Time Has Stopped, 25 February 1928)